One of the magic motifs that occur when you’re constantly ingesting new music is that sometimes you’ll listen to an unassuming record once and find it pleasant enough to listen to again at a later date. Once the later date arrives you find it even better than the last time you listened, and the time in between corresponding listens becomes shorter and shorter. Are you following? This happened to me with the 2021 You’ll Never Get To Heaven album, Wave Your Moonlight Hat for the Snowfall Train, a record I was not anticipating in any way and happened to check out on a whim, only to get lost in its tender limbs and cloudy atmosphere.

I had listened to YNGTH’s previous releases and liked them enough, but nothing about their balmy dream pop had gripped me enough to sustain a constant fandom. Wave Your Moonlight Hat embraces a new direction, opting for ambiguous, impressionistic soundscapes populated by uncanny harmonies, watery piano, fretless bass galore and dreamy field recordings, harkening back to weirdo private press new age + ambient from Japan & beyond. I haven’t heard sounds like this referenced on a record in some time, maybe ever, so it’s been incredibly refreshing to breathe in the woozy fog that emits from my speakers each time I listen. It’s kept me coming back all year. “Eye, Soul and Hand” may be my favorite cut on the album, with a hypnotizing loop of an instrumental and hushed vocals. You can barely consider them “lead” vocals – they just drip into the scene. It’s great. Buy the record via YNGTH’s Bandcamp page, linked below.